A girl waiting for a foster family at the Family Resource Center. In the first 10 months of 2013, an average of 848 children per month were in foster care. / NEWS-LEADER FILE PHOTO

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By the numbers

Where the kids go

Of the first 10 months of 2013 in Greene County, children who were deemed unsafe in their parents’ homes were placed in: 125 A foster home 57 A relative’s home 62 A group home 9 Some other arrangement 253 Total children How long children stay in custody

Of the first 10 months of 2013 in Greene County: 848 Average number of children in out-of-home placement 22.6 Average stay away from home (in months) 9 Average age of child in out-of-home placement From place to place

As of October 2013: 19 Children had been placed in 16 or more different foster homes or other out-of-home placement 121 Children had been placed between 6 to 10 different out-of-home placements 23 Children had been placed between 11 and 15 times in different out-of-home placements

Why were investigations discontinued?

On July 24, the director of the state agency tasked with scrutinizing allegations of child abuse and neglect issued a moratorium on investigations lasting more than 90 days. News-Leader efforts to learn from state officials just what that means or meant for investigations that had already gone beyond time frame were not successful. The division did say no cases in Greene County were affected. Thirty other cases in Southwest Missouri, however, were: four in the Jasper County circuit; one in the Taney and Christian County circuit; and 25 in the Barry, Lawrence and Stone County circuit. Children’s Division spokeswoman Rebecca Woelfel would not answer whether those cases represented individual children, cases including multiple children or multiple cases for individual children. Barbara Brown-Johnson, the executive director of the Child Advocacy Center in Springfield, said, in theory, that ending the investigations could mean that allegations of abuse or neglect would be found unsubstantiated. But even that is unclear. Asked to comment on the moratorium, Greene County Chief Juvenile Officer Perry Epperly said he isn’t sure of the impact either. “You’re looking at the same blank page I am.” – Kathryn Wall

Local statistics increase after window of improvement

A little more than a year ago, the News-Leader exposed the fact that Children’s Division caseworkers in Greene County had routinely missed more deadlines than they made in 2011 and the first few months of 2012. They met only an average of 37 percent of mandated deadlines in that time frame. A new analysis shows improvement in the first few months of 2013 — but then a turn for the worse. Starting in August, the number of cases that were not completed in the 30-day time frame began to again increase. In October, 57.06 percent of cases were completed in that time frame. That’s compared to 70.69 percent of cases in May. – Kathryn Wall

Abuse or neglect allegations investigated

In 2013, workers at the local Children’s Division Office were consistently fielding more allegations of abuse or neglect. Meanwhile, Greene County staffing levels have been a challenge in recent weeks. Source: Missouri Children’s Division

Every Child

The News-Leader’s Every Child public journalism project, started two years ago, focused public attention on critical challenges facing children in our community, fostered discussion and built on existing initiatives to try to find solutions. The News-Leader has committed to doing followup stories on issues that surfaced during the project, and to follow efforts of the Every Child Promise, a community initiative that evolved from the Every Child project.

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The Greene County Children’s Division office is supposed to have 38 workers investigating allegations of child abuse and neglect.

As of Thursday, there were nine.

Nine people tasked with investigating an average of 494 reports per month.

Nine people charged with determining whether complaints have merit, or are unsubstantiated.

Nine on the front lines, in a county of more than 280,000.

Local children’s advocates say recent court decisions — resulting in more pressure from top state officials to close cases — have quickly led, in the words of one prominent advocate, to an environment of “horrendous stress.”

And while those advocates express concern about the workers themselves, the biggest worry is for the children caught in the middle.

“It’s not a good deal for kids, period,” said Barbara Brown-Johnson, the executive director of the Child Advocacy Center in Springfield, which performs forensic interviews on children who are thought to be the victims of abuse or neglect.

She used the phrase “horrendous stress” and worries it has the potential to endanger local children.

“In all sorts of ways, kids’ safety could potentially be compromised,” she said.

Missouri Rep. Bill Lant, R-Pineville, a member of a General Assembly committee examining abuse and neglect issues throughout the state, agreed.

“It’s altogether possible that it will cause a child to be removed or a child to be left in a situation they shouldn’t be.”

Court time frame adds pressure

In two separate cases this year, a state appeals court ruled that a state-mandated time frame for abuse or neglect investigations is absolute.

The courts overturned the findings of abuse or neglect in the two cases because they were made beyond the time frame.

In apparent reaction to those decisions, Missouri Children’s Division director Candace Shively sent the following memo to workers July 24:

“The Missouri Court of Appeals decided that the Children’s Division must not continue work on an investigation after 90 days. No investigations shall go beyond 90 days from this point forward. Effective immediately, staff must stop working on and not conclude any investigation which has been pending for 90 days or more. Further instructions will be provided in the near future.”

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Bradley Harmon, president of the Communications Workers of America local union 6355, which represents local Children’s Division workers, said investigators are now under more pressure than ever before to close cases.

That means coming to a conclusion on whether abuse and neglect occurred within 30 days, and closing the investigation entirely within 90 days.

That’s calendar days, not business days, Harmon said.

Caseworkers are tasked with interviewing family members, reviewing a child’s testimony, examining medical paperwork, inspecting the home environment and reviewing any other evidence that needs to be collected to determine whether a child is the victim of abuse or neglect.

The pressure to make what could be life-or-death decisions quickly has been difficult for caseworkers, Harmon said, especially in complicated cases.

“Nobody wants to close the case, and then a week later, some horrible thing happens,” he said.

In the two weeks preceding this story, six people resigned locally, Harmon said.

With nine investigators now in the field — Harmon said the investigations unit has a total of 15 workers, but six of them are brand new and still in training — that creates an average of 55 cases per month per field investigator.

News-Leader requests to speak directly to local caseworkers were not answered in either the state or local offices.

A request for more information from officials of the state Children’s Division, including an explanation of what Shively’s decision means for children whose cases had already extended beyond 90 days, was denied. The division’s spokeswoman said officials do not comment on pending litigation. Shively is no longer director; now holding the job is Tim Decker, who took over in November.

The Department of Social Services, which oversees the Children’s Division, did appeal the court cases at issue to the state Supreme Court.

The attorney for the department urged justices to follow the intention of the law — to protect victims.

“The question in this case is whether what was intended to be a sword to protect the victims of child abuse and neglect will be flipped and turned into a shield to protect the perpetrators of abuse and neglect,” attorney Gary Gardner said during the Supreme Court hearing.

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He argued that the laws outlining the deadlines were suggestions, not incontrovertible timelines.

“If these timelines are mandatory, it does not promote reasoned decisions. It promotes arbitrary decisions, one way or the other, because a decision has to be made. That does not promote good decision-making,” Gardner said.

Justices heard the case in early December. There’s been no word on when a decision will be made.

Child abuse reports on rise, too

In addition to staffing issues for caseworkers, the overall problem of child abuse and neglect in Greene County shows no signs of waning.

In the first 10 months of 2013, caseworkers determined 419 children had been abused or neglected. That’s compared to 401 children in the first 10 months of 2012.

Although the number has not been finalized, the Child Advocacy Center, which covers 18 counties, saw a record 1,259 kids in 2013 for allegations of sexual or physical abuse.

The previous record was 1,195 in 2012.

The number of calls to the state hotline are up, as well as the number of those calls that are substantiated as having evidence of abuse or neglect.

Compared to 4,908 hotline calls in the first 10 months of 2012, there were 4,942 in that same time frame of 2013.

“We have a horrible problem,” Lant said of abuse and neglect statewide.

“And it’s getting worse.”

Looking to a better future

To advocate for better outcomes — both for workers and the children they serve — a variety of groups have pledged to push for reform.

“Nobody’s sticking their head in the sand. We know there are problems. We know we have committed investigators there. We know we have committed supervisors there. We just don’t have enough of them,” Brown-Johnson said.

Two of the stated priorities of the recently formed Child Abuse and Neglect Collaborative — a collection of advocates and participants in the child welfare network dedicated to preventing abuse — focus on the state system designed to investigate abuse and neglect.

The collaborative wants better conditions for workers and for every abused child reported into the system.

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The Every Child Promise — an effort to improve the lives of young children in this community stemming from the News-Leader’s Every Child Project — will reveal specifics of the Promise group’s strategic plan Jan. 21. It will include ways to prevent abuse and neglect and methods to educatefamilies, according to Dana Carroll, Springfield’s Child Advocate.

Also working on the problem, the General Assembly’s Subcommittee on Child Abuse and Neglect continues to examine the child welfare system and ways to fix it.

Lant is a founding member of the subcommittee. Through his research thus far, he feels the system is broken.

“The only part of the system that I found working adequately was the hotline,” Lant said.

His brief summary report to fellow legislators was no less forceful.

“With very few exceptions, each department admitted to some problems. The system itself appears to be broken at nearly every level,” the report said.

In an initial effort to help, Lant has filed a bill making the first deadline for Children’s Division investigators 30 business days, rather than the current 30 calendar days.

He said the caseworkers he’s talked to haven’t asked for much—many just want more time.

In the future, Lant and others have been discussing additional changes, including more training before workers are put out in the field and a potential job-shadow requirement while workers are still in college.

“For crying out loud, we do a whole semester for teachers” in the field, Lant said.

But Lant thinks workers themselves will likely have the best ideas. Thus far he’s had little luck hearing from them on anything too controversial. Workers tell him they fear retaliation.